SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – The long, winding journey that was Roger Brown’s basketball career will finally come to a proper end Sunday afternoon.

That’s because the New York City playground and high school legend – who saw the prime of his career taken from him by unfounded allegations of point-shaving – will be posthumously honored as one of 12 members of the 2013 class of the Basketball Hall of Fame for his brilliant career with the Indiana Pacers in the ABA.

“This has been a big deal to [the people close to him] for a long time,” said Ted Green, whose documentary about Brown, “Undefeated: The Roger Brown Story” came out earlier this year. “They’ve been waving the flag for this guy. To hear in their voices over the phone just how big of a deal this was, it made me speechless.”

Brown’s long overdue induction certainly wasn’t because of a lack of talent. The 6-foot-5 small forward was the go-to scorer for three championship teams with the Pacers, a four-time ABA All-Star, made three All-ABA teams and was unanimously voted to the All-Time All-ABA team.

And, if that’s not enough, all you have to do is ask anyone who saw Brown play in the 1960s and ‘70s, and they universally gush about his abilities.

“He had the whole package,” said Hall of Famer Mel Daniels, one of Brown’s teammates with the Pacers who will be one of his two presenters, along with fellow Pacers legend Reggie Miller. “He was a superior athlete, he had a superior basketball IQ, he made adjustments on the fly, he had great quickness, extraordinary jumping ability, he could pass, and he was strong as a bull.

“A combination of those things, and you’re talking about a Michael Jordan type of ball player. That’s what he was. Now Michael Jordan, he was born on another planet. We can forget about that one.

“But if [Jordan] was born on another planet, then Roger was the next planet over.”

And it wasn’t just teammates who felt that way about Brown’s talent.

“The Pacers were the class of the league, and Roger was the class of the class,” said fellow Hall of Famer Julius Erving in Green’s documentary.

Another Hall of Famer and prolific scorer, George Gervin, said it even simpler: “Nobody could guard him 1-on-1.”

But Brown’s path from the playgrounds of Brooklyn to enshrinement in Springfield was far from a straight one, thanks to an unfortunate series of events completely out of his control.

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The legend of Roger Brown began long before his exploits with the red, white and blue basketballs of the ABA. Instead, it began on the blacktop courts all around the city in the late 1950s, where he played with and against fellow future Hall of Famers Connie Hawkins and Larry Brown.

In his office at Southern Methodist University, where he’s now the head coach, Brown has a picture of himself, Hawkins, and future collegiate stars Art Heyman (Duke) and Donnie Burks and Kenny McIntyre (St. John’s) that was taken when all of them played for a local amateur team called the New York Gems.

“Well, early on when I played with him, he was an unbelievable athlete,” Larry Brown said. “Just growing up and playing with him, and then playing against him, he was as talented as anybody.”

But by the time Roger Brown and Hawkins reached their senior years at Wingate and Boys High, respectively, they were unquestionably the two top talents in New York City, and arguably the two top talents in the nation. It was against that backdrop that the two squared off in one of the most anticipated games in city high school history on March 15, 1960, when 11,000 packed Madison Square Garden to watch Wingate and Boys High face off in the PSAL semifinals.

“Over the years, a million people must’ve come up to me and said they saw that game,” Hawkins told The Post’s Peter Vecsey with a laugh three years ago on the eve of the game’s 50th anniversary.

That’s because this game was one that more than lived up to the hype bestowed upon it, with Brown and Hawkins guarding each other for most of the game – until Brown, who scored 21 points in the first half and finished the game with 39 – fouled Hawkins out of the game late in the third quarter. Despite the fact that undefeated and heavily-favored Boys High managed to hang on and win the game, it was Brown’s performance that stole the show.

“Why would I want to look back 50 years and think about that game?” Hawkins, who finished with 18 points and 13 rebounds, told Vecsey. “That was the biggest game of my career, and he lit me up.

“If the 3-point shot was in existence, he would’ve had 50. He kept going further and further back. The guy killed me!”

At that moment, it looked like Brown and Hawkins, who would choose to go to Dayton and Iowa, respectively, would fulfill all of the promise that they had put on display in their illustrious prep careers in and around New York.

“Connie and Roger are two of the best young players I ever saw,” said Larry Brown, “and I think I’ve seen a lot of the great ones.”

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But, a little over a year after that momentous game at the Garden, the world fell out from under both Hawkins and Brown, thanks to their loose association with gambler Jack Molinas. With basketball still suffering from the after-effects of a point-shaving scandal involving Molinas, a former basketball star at Columbia who played briefly in the NBA before being banned for life in 1954 for his role in the scandal, he reappeared in a similar scheme in 1961.

Molinas gave both Hawkins and Brown some money, but never implicated them in any point-shaving schemes and there was no evidence that either Hawkins or Brown had ever been involved in one. Regardless, both players were banned from both the NCAA and the NBA because of their connections with Molinas, suddenly leaving them both without any clear path forward in the sport that both had seemed destined to star in.

Brown would later also be denied an opportunity to play for the 1964 Olympic team for the same reason. And, although both Hawkins and Brown would later separately sue the NBA and win damages after the league admitted it had no evidence of wrongdoing by either of them, no settlement could return to them the years of their primes lost because of the unjustified bans.

“When you’re involved with guys like Roger and Connie and they’re affected by that … I mean, you know what kind of people they are and it just blew me away,” Larry Brown said.

While Hawkins played in the American Basketball League and then for the Harlem Globetrotters during his exile, Roger Brown went back to Dayton, where he was taken into the home of Azariah and Arlena Smith. It was there where Brown, with the help of the Smiths, began to rebuild himself and move forward.

“Without them,” said Green, “I’m convinced there is no ABA career or Hall of Fame for Roger Brown.”

Instead of starring at Dayton University on his way to the NBA, Brown was working on an assembly line and playing for amateur teams in Dayton like Jones Morticians, traveling hours to play in old gyms against forgotten opponents, far from the kinds of stages his talent merited.

But that all changed in 1967, when the ABA was founded and Brown finally caught a break. The first player the Indiana Pacers went after once the team was formed was hometown hero Oscar Robertson, who turned them down. But Robertson told the team’s owners that there was a player in Dayton – Brown – that they should take a look at.

Eventually, the Pacers convinced Brown to sign with them, a decision that became the foundation of arguably the greatest team in the league’s history.

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“The first time I saw Roger, I knew … I was an old NBA player myself, and I knew the first time I saw Roger that he was very, very talented,” said Bob “Slick” Leonard, Brown’s coach with the Pacers beginning in 1968. “The thing, at that particular time, it was hard for him to trust anyone.

“Roger was kind of a quiet guy, and what he had been through … but we kept at it, and not only did he trust me, but we became great friends. It was a wonderful four or five years that we spent together.”

Brown was the anchor of a terrific assortment of talent, including league MVPs in Daniels and George McGinnis alongside him in the frontcourt and point guard Freddie Lewis running the show in the backcourt. The Pacers would go on to win three titles in four seasons (1970, ’72 and ’73), but it was always clear – despite the preponderance of talent on the team’s roster – who Indiana’s go-to player was whenever they needed a basket.

“I would say 98 percent of the time, when we needed it at the end of a game, he came through,” Daniels said. “That’s the type of basketball player he was.”

“I think about all of the game winners, the game winners that he came up with,” Leonard said. “There were a lot of them, and he always said, ‘When the money’s on the line, I’ll be there.’

“And he always was.”

Brown never came up bigger than he did in 1970, when he helped lead the Pacers past the Los Angeles Stars to the team’s first championship. In the final three games of the series, Brown scored a staggering 137 points to help lead the Pacers to the title, including 53 points, 13 rebounds and six assists in a Game 4 win and 45 points in the series-clinching win for Indiana in Game 6.

“When you listen to guys like Dr. J. and George Gervin, they all knew,” Leonard said. “They all knew how good Roger was.

“In my day I played with Elgin Baylor and I played with Jerry West, and guys that are great are special, and Roger was a special guy, a special talent. It just so happened that, like in other sports, he could do things that other guys just couldn’t do.”

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So now, 16 years after Brown passed away at 54 after a bout with liver cancer, he’s finally getting the kind of recognition his family, friends, teammates and opponents all believe he’s deserved all along – even if he’s not able to soak in that recognition for himself.

“It’s unfortunate for me personally that he’s not going to experience it,” Larry Brown said. “I got to experience it and I still don’t believe I was put in there, but I know what it’s meant to me and my friends and family.

“But for anybody that’s been touched by him and been around him and watched him play and saw the kind of person he was, we’re all feeling pretty good about this.”

For many of those close to Roger Brown, however, him finally receiving the call from the Hall of Fame doesn’t mean that all is forgiven for the injustices Brown was forced to deal with through what should have been prime years of his playing career.

“It doesn’t exonerate people for doing what they did to him,” Daniels said. “It shouldn’t make anybody feel better that they denied him a special part of his life.”

Still, Daniels — who was inducted last year but was too ill to attend — is thrilled that he gets a chance to honor his old friend by being one of his presenters when Brown finally receives his long overdue honor Sunday.

“It means an awful lot that I’m here and being a part of his induction into the Hall of Fame, because we were close,” Daniels said. “We were almost like brothers. But the sadness comes in the fact that he’s not here. But Reggie and I are here, and his son and daughter are here representing him and representing his memory, and that is a good feeling, and a feeling that is unexplainable.

“I can’t express how grateful I am that this opportunity was allowed to me because this is as good as me being inducted, having Roger be inducted.”

And, most of all, for those close to Brown it’s a chance for more people to learn about him and the career he was able to put together despite the obstacles placed in his way.

“[Today] should be a tremendous day, a tremendous day, and I’m really looking forward to it,” Leonard said. “Here’s a guy that’s really deserving. The NBA took the years away from him without any evidence, and it was a tough life for him.